New Laptop: Dell Precision M4300 w/Redhat Linux!

• Fast machine, very good performance, nice feel (though bulkier than my favorite IBM/Lenovo T43p)
• Beautiful display! The 1920x1200 is a wonderful resolution, and when you have an external LCD at same resolution... sweet. Add on top of that 16 virtual screens, and we are in business.
• Take out the DVD player, replace with extra battery... This machine runs for 5-8 hours, suspends nicely

• Redhat... registration didn't work. Redhat didn't have the registration numbers, so the updates are missing. Redhat support is helpful and courteous, but it still is a serious hassle to get it working once you flunk the original. I ended just giving up on the Redhat, and putting my usual CentOS repo's active — all problems solved, though now I have a hybrid half Redhat, half CentOS system
• The IPW3945 network card sucks... it's flaky, works for about 8 hours and bails... doesn't want to switch between networks (ESSID's)... see below for my "cure"
• Keyboard light (of all things) does not work
• Peculiar default disk layout: 10GB for /home and the rest in an LVM for / — nothing that can't be cured with a lot of symlinks, but a hassle again
• No default mounts for the embedded Redhat ISO image — small detail, easily fixed

• 64 bit OS... wasn't my choice. For a laptop you don't need/want a 64 bit OS, 32 bit version works better. I know, I can't have 4GB of RAM with 32 bit, but I would have been content with just the 3.6GB available. What's the problem? No JVM plugin for browser (Firefox), No Flash plugin for browser, ...
• CrossOver? office apparently can crash X — really bad... I'm still researching this

ifdown eth1
pkill ipw3945d
rm /var/run/ipw3945d.pid
rmmod ipw3945 ieee80211 ieee80211_crypt_wep ieee80211_crypt
modprobe ipw3945
/sbin/ipw3945d
ifup eth1

/dev/sda2               /mnt/w95                vfat    ro              0 0
/mnt/w95/dvd1.iso       /mnt/iso                iso9660 ro,loop         0 0

Portable computer

• 2 GHz Pentium4
• 1600x1200 LCD
• 1 GB of RAM
• 60 GB Hard disk
• WiFi (802.11) A, B & G built in
• 10/100/1000 Mbit network (when you're in a hurry, that gigabit NIC really lets you slurp data fast)
• DVD-RW
• Extra capacity battery

Modifications, additions

• 80 GB hard disk — that 60 GB just had to go... also it was WinXP infested
• 1 GB of RAM, total of 2 GB... so much nicer, faster — at first I thought that 2 GB of RAM would be unnecessary drain on batteries... but compare the disk swapping/thrashing, and you'll see that memory makes the difference
• Second battery; that extra capacity just wasn't enough — the DVD-RW drive is out
• GPRS modem (like a GSM cell phone) — having that 128 kbps everywhere is nice
• AC/DC power supply; works with any voltage/plug on the planet, as well as cars and airplanes without inverter

Operating System

• CentOS 3.4 — binary compatible with RedHat? Enterprise Linux 3 Update 4, rock solid — last thing you want on the road is a reboot game
• Connexant modem driver; despite WiFi, GPRS, Infrared, CAT5... you still sometimes need that old POTS RJ-11
• Special script for pppd(8) to make the GPRS & POTS more persistant, as well as to deal with the roaming of GPRS modem
• Local caching nameserver; don't want to be dependent on unknown nameservers, slight mods needed again to HUP the server whenever a new IP or interface is acquired
• Some modifications to XF86Config-4 to support dual heads; 1600x1200 on LCD, 1280x1024 for projector
• Nightly rsync process for automatic snapshot backups... I lost two hard disks with the T30, thanks to snapshot backups I lost less than an hour both times

Applications

• Crossover Office — allows me to run MSOffice, MSProject and Visio. I don't care much for Windows, but Office is a necessity to communicate with the executive level at a company
• Treepad for jotting down notes; hierarchical notepad
• Gaim for Yahoo messenger replacement
• Up-to-date Mozilla (1.7.3) with J2SDK (1.4.2_07) and Flash plugins

Seriously important enhancements

• 16 screens on KDE! How I ever was able to survive with anything less... I have no idea
• Dead key (aka International) keyboard layout; instead of switching between English, Finnish and French keyboard layouts; just one keyboard where you can type "mitä hyvänsä" is cool
• A little bit of mobile routing magic... Point your Perforce client to your local machine with P4PORT=localhost:1666, and then use an iptables statement to route it to your perforce server, unless you're using GPRS and a SSH tunnel
• Another bit of mobile routing is to use SSH as proxy tunnel — works wonders to both increase security as well as compress traffic; good for those open wireless networks, where everybody sees your traffic